Thanks for that. I thought I had double-checked everything before I made the copy, fixing the dialogues spelling and ensuring parralax was 0,0 on my layer for said dialogues. I copied lots over from the official tutorial, where everything is dialogues for some reason. Apologies.
Local variables inside events is something I was unaware was necessary, nor did the tutorial I was using mention this. The JSON path is also straight from the tutorial, so I am doubly annoyed that it's wrong there too.
Layer names in the events were always red, so I went with numbers since the software itself says you can use them- is that not the case?
I admit, I am not a huge fan of the way many tutorials I've found are flawed in some way, especially ones I spent hours fighting with.
Appreciate your help fellow Construct user.